Find Old Usenet Messages

You can conduct interesting historical exploration by finding ancient Usenet
messages by searching for the
unique headers that
were used on the older format messages. This enables you to find messages
from the old Usenet before it became a popular public medium.

You
can see the differences between modern Usenet messages
and older Usenet messages by comparing the headers. The format of
modern Usenet messages is shown below:

Since the string "Article-I.D." is
unique to the older format, you should be able search the Internet for old Usenet messages by searching for that string. However, for efficiency
reasons search engines don't index characters like dash "-" and period ".",
so a more useful search query puts that phrase first and then follows it with
the other terms from the older header:

The above example searches return a sampling of historical Usenet
messages that, for whatever reason, were of sufficient interest
to be posted to the web, although the number of these old messages
still to be found are declining in number each year. In 2004 on
Google the three searches
above returned only
325, 10,
and 8 responses respectively. To search a larger pool
of older Usenet messages than are posted on the web, you can also
search a Usenet
archive.